Be careful what you wish for! The rain has stopped, but every last growing thing in the area is doing just that–growing. I have decided to invest in a hay baler for the lawn, or maybe a herd of goats, and don’t even ask about the weeds. BUT … the sun is shining and garage sales are on. Look out world, here we come.

We are both mad purse fanatics. You don’t even want to know how many of them live at our respective homes. We have some pretty crazy ones, but they are at least pretty, or funny, not this:

WTF? The Yellow Rose of Texas, this is not. Sorry about the weird angle on the picture, but they had it in the showcase. For the life of us, we couldn’t figure out why, as no one in their right mind would steal this. I don’t believe we could see any maker’s mark on it, and it is falling apart. Seriously, there is a time for the trash can, and this is it.

We were just positive this was a homemade job:

Crocheted faux alligator circles just scream from the pages of the latest craft magazine, but noooooo, this one had a label. Nothing special, and they forgot to run it by the taste department, but there you have it. Do people really carry these things? And if they do, don’t other people point, stare and giggle? (We do, but quietly, off in the distance.)

Now this purse, we found amusing, but strangely, not amusing enough for either one of us to take home:

We love paper beads, especially vintage ones (these are not old, but cool) and how fun are they on a purse? See:

Love all those bright colors. Why have a floppy dingy yellow rose or pseudo reptile, when you could have this?

As an aside here, I have to mention that these are the opinions of us, the writers, and we will be the first to claim that we don’t know diddly-squat. I am just saying this for the peace of mind of those who find some of our dislikes oddly appealing. Doesn’t mean we won’t make fun of them; we just won’t judge you!

While we are on the subject of fashion. We have to mention that sometimes fashion is NOT a pretty thing. Take these:

I don’t care if they do say Dolce & Gabbana, they are flat-out ugly. Kinda looks like a gilded robot came and sat on your head. If ever there were victims of the fashion police, the buyers of these hats are they! Of course, there are two of them, and they look pretty unworn, so maybe enough divas figured out the ruse, and left them till there was overstock.

This basket had us chortling from the get-go:

We both grabbed for it at the same time, as the overwhelming curiosity as to whether there were faces on the other side gripped us both. Of course there were:

Let’s all sing together: It’s a small world after all, It’s a small world after all … I apologize for the ear worm, but we sang it the rest of the day, why shouldn’t you?

If you haven’t figured it out by now, we love old boxes. We love folks who keep things in old boxes. We drag old boxes home, sometimes. So here is another old box and its contents:

The box was way more fun than the candles, but we did get a kick out of the quote on the box: “Will not bend over in hot weather” I feel that way about cooking in hot weather, but it never got me anywhere. As an aside, we saw a bag of beeswax candles later in the morning that most assuredly DID bend over and then some, so the whole thing was a lie, but the box was still cute.

Of course the above candles were better than these candle holders:

Surely this was a grand Pinterest Fail? Lace and rocks and pearls glued to their death on the sacrificial altar of candle holders. They can’t even look good with a candle in them, and there is no chance of a mercy fire taking out the decorations. They liked doing them so much, they made another one; we found it later:

At least they were patriotic, but they could have done their country a favor and dropped it on the way to the picnic.

Didn’t want to forget to mention the supporting actor in the first candle holder picture. Notice it cowering behind the candle holders? We found several of the big glass jars filled with just plain old pasta this past week. Here is another one:

We decided that if you MUST fill a glass jar with something to spruce up your kitchen, DRY pasta seems like a much better choice than gelatinous vegetables that are the usual fare. In an emergency, you could eat the pasta. I wouldn’t trust that other stuff to not give you the biggest case of Montezuma’s Revenge ever recorded.

We think that if the oily veggies were consumed, you would probably look like this:

Either that, or the movie Sybil is much older than we think. This thing was probably a foot across, so it was no little feat to bring it home from the vacation. Again, we offer our services on what to buy when on vacation. Think small, tasteful jewelry. I hope it was a personal souvenir and not a gift, unless they were looking to get rid of that particular friendship. Pretty sure this would have been mission accomplished.

OK, enough already–I always like to end on a high note, so here is just an overload of cuteness:

At least we think so. We sometime feel the need to be ’40s housewives, just so we could have darling cookware. Then we think of life without a microwave, cooking in heels and a house dress, and get over ourselves. If this hadn’t had a cracked lid, we probably would have caved. Seems like they could just make some better-looking stuff these days, and satisfy the craving.

Well, that’s it for this week. Here’s to garage sale season wherever you are, and if you find something awful, send us the photo, we adore hearing from our readers, and we won’t even point and laugh … much.